Death and the Meaning of Life

Abstract

Thoughts of mortality sometimes bring on a crisis in confidence in the meaning in one's life. One expression of this collapse is the midlife crisis. In a recent article, Kieran Setiya argues that if one can value activities as opposed to accomplishments as the primary goods in one's life then one might avoid the midlife crisis. I argue that Setiya's advice, rather than safeguarding the meaning in one's life, substitutes for it something else, a kind of happiness. I use Susan Wolf's concept of meaning in order to make this case. Wolf has not written much about the importance of death, but I argue that her account of meaning shares essential features with the theories developed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. Sartre argues that death is an unqualified harm, while Heidegger argues that there is meaning in life only because we are mortal. I conclude by showing how Heidegger's theory of mortality underwrites accounts of meaning like those found in Wolf.     

“Till Death Us Do Part”: Issues of Fidelity in End of Life Care

SUMMARY

This paper was born of the experience of caring for a loved one at the end of life. The sense of being torn between accepting one's lot and wishing for something “other” is at the heart of the concept described as “intimate fidelity.” Intimate fidelity is discussed as part of a multi-layered concept of fidelity, embracing aspects of the professional caring relationship, and which builds into a value that shapes the fabric of the community.

Academic literature fails to address this understanding of fidelity, so with some creativity, we turned to popular literature—novels and biographies—to find rich understandings of the concept of fidelity. Then following a traditional system of thematic analysis, three aspects of the concept of fidelity are presented, in the context of caring for loved ones, professional caring, and caring in the community.     

The relativity of grief: Differential adaptation reactions of younger and older persons

Abstract

A study was conducted to investigate the differential emotional and coping responses of 41 older (M = 66.5 years) and 48 younger (M = 23.5 years) respondents who had recently lost a close loved one to death. Respondents completed a questionnaire in which they gave an account of the death of their loved one, information about how they coped with this loss, and responses concerning their emotions pertaining to the loss. As predicted, older respondents reported a higher degree of account-making (i.e., story-like constructions) about their losses and confiding in close others than did younger respondents. Further, older respondents showed fewer negative and more positive responses than younger respondents. These results were interpreted to suggest that older respondents were less acutely devastated by their losses and are consistent with the idea that     

Augustine and education in critical thinking

Augustine's concept of the deep self provides a basis for a complex and many‐faceted account of critical thinking. He uncovers the moral sources of thinking in the inner depths of the self and shows that critical thinking presupposes radical self‐reflection ready to face the truth about oneself. Self‐knowledge assumes transparency, consciousness of the corrupt desires and prejudices that distort one's thinking. Unresolved guilt endangers transparency and thereby makes it difficult to become aware of the vices distorting one's perspective on reality. That is why human beings need divine grace that gives them the courage to face their corruption.

For Augustine, the problem of critical thinking is part of a larger problem about how the human self and identity are formed, which factors influence the process, and how a person comes to know herself. Augustine writes an open account of his life in order to clarify this problem. His intention is to make sense of the nature of his self by thinking carefully who he is and how he became who he is.

Augustine seeks to find an answer to this question both philosophically and autobiographically, by analysing the factors that influenced the formation of his own identity and the development of his self‐knowledge and by reflecting philosophically on the nature of these influences. Reason is one essential part of the human soul. Since God has given reason to human beings, it must have a purpose. Augustine seeks to clarify this purpose by reflecting on fundamental epistemological questions: What is knowledge and where does it come from? What is the relationship of human reason to knowledge? How can one reach ultimate knowledge?

According to Augustine, human reason and perception have been formed to acquire knowledge about reality. If God had not made human reason and perception fitting for their task, knowledge would be completely unattainable. Since God has made human reason capable of acquiring reliable knowledge, reason has an important task in the spiritual development of human beings. It is especially useful when trying to make clear conceptual distinctions.

Reason does not, however, function independently of the will and the emotions. For reason to acquire a reliable grasp on reality and to understand things properly, the human heart must love the truth, the good and the right sufficiently to face its own prejudices and to gain self‐knowledge.

Critical thinking has, therefore, certain crucial preconditions, according to Augustine. The aim of this article is to clarify the structure of these preconditions. (1) In order to think critically, one has to distinguish between how reality appears to one and how it is in fact. (2) There is a close connection between willing and thinking, between one's deepest desires and one's view on reality. (3) One cannot distinguish reality from appearances unless one realizes how corrupt desires and prejudices distort one's perspective on reality. (4) In order to be able to face one's evil desires and become conscious of their distorting influence, one needs the courage to face one's depravity. Such a courage presupposes God's grace and his promise of forgiveness, since without divine grace human beings try to cover up the truth about themselves and remain unconscious of the distorting influence of their evil desires. (5) One needs a source of light that enlightens the deep recesses of the self and shows it in the true light but is yet external to the human being and independent of him. (6) This source of inner light has to be of a personal nature to provide the learner with the possibility of inner dialogue. Augustine assumes that God is the inner teacher of every human being. A crucial factor in the development of critical thinking is that one becomes more dialogically engaged with the inner teacher.     

Venerating Death

Abstract

In this paper, I am concerned with elucidating and expanding our attitudes toward our own death. As it is, our common attitudes toward our death are the following: we fear our premature death, and we dread our inevitable death. These attitudes are rational, but I want to argue that our attitudes toward death should be more complicated than this. A condition upon our value, our preciousness, as creatures is that we are vulnerable, and our vulnerability is, at bottom, a vulnerability to death. A corollary of this is that we could not be loved, either by ourselves or by others, for one cannot love—be concerned for—a being invulnerable to death. As a consequence, death plays a deep and abiding role in our value systems. Our susceptibility to premature and inevitable death is a condition upon our being valuable creatures and, in turn, it is a condition upon our being loved. Given the high value that we place on being valuable creatures who deserve love, we should equally place a high value on the constitutive conditions for being precious and loved. If, as I suggest, one of these conditions is that we will die, we should see our deaths not simply as something to fear or dread, but as something of great importance in our lives. Our deaths should be treated with awe, respect, and even praise.     

The Trauma and Complicated Grief of Ambiguous Loss

Ambiguous loss is a newly identified type of loss that occurs when a loved one is physically present, but psychologically absent. Dementia is just one example. Because the lost person is here, but not here, grief is frozen, life is put on hold, and people are traumatized. With no official verification of death, no possibility of closure, and no rituals for support, there is no resolution of grief (Boss 1999). Clergy, especially pastoral counselors, can witness and provide comfort for such uncanny loss because people rely on them for support, not just from the clear loss of death, but from the ambiguous losses, catastrophic and ordinary, that inevitably will occur across the life course.     

Internalized Oppression and Its Varied Moral Harms: Self‐Perceptions of Reduced Agency and Criminality

The dominant view in the philosophical literature contends that internalized oppression, especially that experienced in virtue of one's womanhood, reduces one's sense of agency. Here, I extend these arguments and suggest a more nuanced account. In particular, I argue that internalized oppression can cause a person to conceive of herself as a deviant agent as well as a reduced one. This self‐conception is also damaging to one's moral identity and creates challenges that are not captured by merely analyzing a reduced sense of agency. To help illustrate this claim, I consider experiences of people of color who internalize stereotypes regarding criminality and moral deviance. With these examples in mind, I show that internalized prejudices regarding criminality can cause people of color (men and women) to view themselves as outlaws in the moral community, that is, as wrongdoers. This conclusion helps give voice to some of the challenges that women of color who experience multiple sorts of internalized prejudices often face. To conclude, I discuss one strategy for empowerment that women of color have used when confronted with multiple forms of internalized oppression.     

Proxy Agency in Collective Action

This paper gives an account of proxy agency in the context of collective action. It takes the case of a group announcing something by way of a spokesperson as an illustration. In proxy agency, it seems that one person or subgroup's doing something counts as orconstitutes or is recognized as (tantamount to) another person or group's doing something. Proxy agency is pervasive in institutional action. It has been taken to be a straightforward counterexample to an appealing deflationary view of collective action as a matter of all members of a group making a contribution to bringing about some event. I show that this is a mistake. I give a deflationary account of constitutive rules in terms of essentially collective action types. I then give an account of one form of constitutive agency in terms of constitutive rules. I next give an account of status functions—of which being a spokesperson is one—that also draws on the concept of a constitutive rule. I then show how these materials help us to see how proxy agency is an expression of the agency of all members of the group credited with doing something when the proxy acts.     

Believing at Will is Possible

There are convincing counter-examples to the widely accepted thesis that we cannot believe at will. For it seems possible that the truth of a proposition depend on whether or not one believes it. I call such scenarios cases of Truth Depends on Belief (TDB) and I argue that they meet the main criteria for believing at will that we find in the literature. I reply to five objections that one might level against the thesis that TDB cases show that believing at will is possible, namely that (1) mind-reading is impossible, (2) in TDB cases, one's belief is caused by one's desire, (3) in TDB scenarios, one chooses not a belief but something else, (4) TDB cases are reducible to Feldman cases, and that (5) if truth depends on belief, we are on the road to a regress. Of course, TDB scenarios hardly, if ever, occur in real life. For three reasons, they are nonetheless important. First, they show that the thesis that it is conceptually impossible to believe at will is simply false. Second, they provide us with an important constraint on any version of the thesis that it is psychologically impossible to believe at will. Third, they show us that, contrary to what several philosophers claim or imply, believing at will should not be identified with believing irrespective of—what one considers to be—the truth, nor should believing irrespective of the truth be considered a necessary condition for believing at will.     

Ethics,Identity and the Boundaries of the Person

Abstract

Ethical theories and theories of the person constrain each other, in that a proposition about the person may be a reason for or against an ethical proposition, and conversely. An important class of such propositions about the person concern the boundaries of the person. These boundaries enclose a person's defining properties, which constitute his identity. A person's identity may partly determine and partly be determined by his ethical judgments. An equilibrium between one's identity and one's ethical judgments is the counterpart, at the personal level, of the philosophical ideal of reflective equilibrium between a theory of the person and an ethical theory.     

Protecting Persons from Animal Bites: the Case for the Ontological Significance of Persons

Eric Olson criticizes Lynne Baker’s constitution account of persons on the grounds that personhood couldn’t be ontologically significant as nothing new comes into existence with the acquisition of thought. He claims that for something coming to function as a thinker is no more ontologically significant than something coming to function as a locomotor when a motor is added to it. He levels two related charges that there’s no principled answer about when and where constitution takes place rather than an already existing object just acquiring new properties. I’ll argue that none of these objections are problems for understanding person to be a substantial kind.

     

The (impossible) Future of Hermeneutics

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the negativity of hermeneutic experience is revelatory for the following reasons. Hermeneutic failure is not the equivalent of making an erroneous step in a closed circuit of reasoning. Neither is it a refutation. It concerns becoming conscious of an omission, an oversight, an unjustifiable claim to completeness and even the displacement of one interpretation by another more suggestive. The negative dimension of hermeneutic failure is incontrovertibly connected with becoming progressively aware of how, contrary to expectations, a different way of seeing is possible: something comes to light which displaces one’s former judgement. Consciousness of failure is, then, indissociable from an emergent awareness of overlooked and unremarked ways of thinking: “I should have been alert to this” or “I failed to take account of that”. Consciousness of failure is revelatory precisely because something else and something other than my expectation has shown itself to be decisive and in so doing has displaced my former understanding. This is the basis of the claim that the educative and spiritual importance of hermeneutics lies precisely in the practical pursuit of the impossible. It is a key contention of the paper that hermeneutic understanding expands and extends itself as a consequence of its impossible quest for completion.     

The Creation of the Dyad in the Suspension of Singular Personal Reality

ABSTRACT

Through an ongoing, nonconfrontive sharing of subjective realities, this goal can be realized: experiencing the other as a full person rather than an imbedded object in one's own version of life. The chance to experience true intimacy rests in not confusing our image of our partner with the full person. The therapist serves as catalyst and conduit in exchanging the dual realities to reach this goal.     

Personal Identity and the Importance of One's Own Body: A Response to Derek Parfit

In this essay I take issue with Derek Parfit's reductionist account of personal identity.Parfit is concerned to respond to what he sees as flaws in the conception of the role of 'person' in self-interest theories. He attempts to show that the notion of a person as something over and above a totality of mental and physical states and events (in his words, a 'further fact'), is empty, and so, our ethical concerns must be based on something other than this. My objections centre around the claim that Parfit employs an impoverished conception of 'life'. Parfit misconceives the connection between 'I' and one's body, and, so, despite his rejection of a metaphysical conception of 'self', remains within the logic of Cartesianism. What Parfit and other reductionists call an 'impersonal' perspective, I shall call the third-person perspective: a perspective which one in general may take. Against Parfit I shall offer a more complex conception of 'self' through the concept of 'bodily perspective'. I emphasize the irreducible ambiguities of human embodiment in order to show the presuppositions and the limitations of Parfit's view. Of interest is the conception of time and the model of continuity that is appropriate to an embodied subject's life. I employ Paul Ricoeur's concept of 'human time' to argue that the reflective character of human experience demands a model of temporality and continuity that differs significantly from the one Parfit employs.     

Mental ghosts and the process of grief

Abstract

Grieving the death of a loved one is an experience that many people will face at least once in their lifetime, but the lack of widely accepted guidelines as to what constitutes “normal” grieving results in mourning being a common experience with little universality. Memories may keep the deceased alive in the minds of the survivor and may even interfere with the formation of new relationships. This article considers the process of grieving the loss of a spouse and some of the individual factors, such as age, sex, and personal beliefs, that may account for variability in grief experiences. While several modeh detailing the grief process are discussed, the inappropriateness of establishing expectations for the nature and duration of grief is argued for.     

The Disenchantment of Nonsense: Understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus

This paper aims to argue against the resolute reading, and offer a correct way of reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus. According to the resolute reading, nonsense can neither say nor show anything. The Tractatus does not advance any theory of meaning, nor does it adopt the notion of using signs in contravention of logical syntax. Its sentences, except a few constituting the frame, are all nonsensical. Its aim is merely to liberate nonsense utterers from nonsense. I argue that these points are either not distinctive from standard interpretations or incorrect. Instead, the Tractarian elucidations help to shed light on the nature of language and logic, and introduce the correct method in philosophy. Philosophy deals with philosophical utterances and Tractarian elucidations by pointing out that they are nonsensical. By doing this, one is helped to see that what they appear to be saying is shown by significant propositions saying something else.     

Gaining and losing weight: Identity transformations

Individuals who experience weight problems frequently have a long history of weight gain and weight loss. Based on observation and participation, this study follows a group of dieters in a weight loss clinic over a period of one year. The findings suggest that social factors in the dieter's world have a significant impact on the degree of success experienced. Of particular significance are the perceptions of others once extensive weight loss occurs. It is argued that the loss of weight is only one of a number of issues that the heavy person deals with as he or she moves into the thin world.     

Truthmaking and fundamentality

Consider the idea that some entities are more fundamental than others, some entities ‘ground’ other, less fundamental, entities. What is it for something to be more fundamental than another, or for something to ‘ground’ something else? This paper urges the rejection of conceptions of grounding and fundamentality according to which reality has a hierarchical structure in which higher-level entities are taken to be distinct from but metaphysically dependent on more fundamental lower-level entities. Truthmaking is offered as an apt replacement for at least some of the many applications of grounding.

     

Moral Taint: On the Transfer of the Implications of Moral Culpability

Suppose two people are about to drown. We are in a position to save only one, so the other will have to die. One of the two has just culpably killed an innocent person, but has no intention of killing anybody else and there is no reason to expect that he will. Everything else being equal, should we give them an equal chance of being saved by flipping a coin? In this paper I argue that we should not. I argue that the implications of a person's moral culpability for (recent or prospective) harm to a particular victim should transfer to other conflict situations in which the wrongdoer might find him or herself. This requires establishing the extent to which a person's contributing to harming another person — and his moral culpability for that harm — impinges on our decision making in situations where it is possible only to assist either the wrongdoer or some other person that is not his victim.     

Clinical and Pastoral Issues and Challenges in Working With the Dying and Their Families

How might counseling professionals interact with clients facing their own or a loved one's serious illness or death and help prepare them for this severe stress and loss? Counseling professionals are encouraged to do no harm, be sensitive to beliefs and traditions, use life stories, and help resolve unfinished business.